Z S's List: Emotions- Bio Research Paper

In an evolutionary context, the emotional system is, of course, the foundation ofthat most fundamental survival adaptation, the fight or flight response, and, through the operations of the amygdala, is designed to detect threats and danger and to initiate responses automatically. This is an evolutionarily old system that we share with virtually all vertebrates. LeDoux (1996) argues that it is precisely the merging of the emotional and cognitive systems that has conferred upon us our immense evolutionary advantage because it allows us to shift from simple automatic reactions to planned actions. Damasio (1994) has further shown that the emotional system plays a major role in the action-planning phase. It does this by biasing the selection of memory images that represent those options, thus constraining choice to a range already "preselected" by the emotional system. Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis (which I shall later argue offers a very promising framework in which to see the possible operation of anomalous information in consciousness) is based upon a very close working relationship between the emotional system and memory (Broughton, 2002).